The Case for Being Depressed
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Maybe there’s a reason you’re feeling at the end of your rope, beyond your psychology and biochemistry: modern culture, mortality, and the world itself
Adapted from “unGlommed, The Guerrilla Approach to Beating Depression” by Lev Metropol.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Einstein
As the pandemic endures and our culture seems to be plummeting down the rabbit hole of political polarization and seeming environmental cataclysm, our anxiety and depression can be DEFCON levels.
But what about the deeper reasons that we may feel a continual, nagging sense of not-OK-ness? Could it be that life all on its own is depressing enough, and much of our suffering is not our fault?
Eckhart Tolle, the sagacious author of The Power of Now, makes an interesting point-on observation. The moment we depart this mortal realm, he says, all of the hopes and desires and concerns and wishes that had so obsessed and thrilled us — mostly, our strivings for love, comfort, success, safety, and achievement — will be rendered meaningless. They will become so unimportant that they will handily fit, metaphorically speaking, in the “dash” between the date of our birth and the date of our death that’s engraved on our headstones or written in our obituaries.
Everything that you spend your time thinking about, consciously or un — family, career, finances, the fate of your soul, your legacy, that novel you’re planning to write that you know will be like no other — planted wanly for all eternity in the bitsy, teensy, ridiculously inanimate half-inch mark. That’s all that will be left of you. In time, no one will even take the time to look at it.
That’s how important you are.
Lev Metropol
RIP
1963–2039
It Had All Seemed So Important
Gosh, it really had.
Now, let’s take a little trip in time into a future that’s AY (After You). You’re gone. You’re history. The experiences and people and loves and accomplishments that had moved you to joy and tears and obsessed you are, well, nothing. Nada. They are only to be found in the ridiculously little “dash.”
Hey! Look there! Do you see those grandchildren of yours straining to remember a few details about you? Actually, all they can recall is that you didn’t clip your nose hairs, scratched yourself a bit too often, and didn’t give them enough money. Gosh, darn.
Now, travel forward another 30 or 40 years and … Hey, what’s this? Not a single soul can even recall that you existed at all.
Imagine that. You’ve been totally forgotten. Actually, it’s hard to imagine that. But try anyway.
My goodness. The nerve of … the way things are.
So, what good then are all your mental machinations, your worrying, your anxiety? The world will not remember you. I am sorry. It will not recall what you had cared about, even perhaps at the price of your health (something that actually does matter). In that future time, a common housefly buzzing around your great-grandkid’s kitchen will be more relevant than you.
Feel that. How is it sitting with you? Does it bring on discomfort? Anger? Or maybe relief: “Hey, no problema! I’m outta here, thank God!”
If you’re a glass-half-full type, you may have just barely made it beyond your revilement at that idea to read this sentence.
So, what does matter?
The Bushido Code
Maybe everything has meaning and purpose. Perhaps there is a master plan at work behind all of this (that, curiously, includes all the unfairness and brutality in the world). Maybe every move we make, every decision we take, every action we engage is integral in a complex symphony of unfathomable importance set in motion by the Almighty Herself right after the Big Bang, with us as the precious beating heart at its center. Wouldn’t that be nice? Just about every primitive culture thought so.
Or, could the universe be what the atheists believe, a random stew of meaningless materiality with no rhyme or reason beyond its simple existence? Might then the sour worldview of the typical depressive be more justified than, say, the hopeful perspective of a pious Christian, altruistic secular humanist, or random shiny, happy person?
Maybe the idea that “this universe originated in a cipher and aimlessly rushes nowhere,” as feared by Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, is dead-on accurate.
Like the samurai warriors of old who lived by the Bushido code, which required the contemplation of death daily to encourage an appreciation of life right now, many of us who wrestle with a depressive demon find that we can coexist with the terrible fact that we enter this world with an expiration date. Reality doesn’t throw us quite the way it does “normal” people awash in the thrill of life. Perhaps such a perspective can be used to create an opening for healing … But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
More than likely, you, like virtually everyone, have tried to run away from an awareness of the ephemeral nature of your life. You’ve embraced strategies aimed at avoidance, supported, cheered on, and abetted by ubiquitous, seemingly sane aspects of society.
Busy, Busy, Busy
Our culture is the most active and creative in human history, offering endless ways to engage, titillate, and get ourselves off. What past society, for example, has offered up such activities as hot yoga, World of Warcraft gaming, the addictive drinking of air freshener, and celebrity impersonator conventions? Our species is masterful at devising means of escape. One of the less obvious ones is compulsive busyness. Most of us can’t stop doing. We are endlessly striving.
Why? Where, ultimately, do we hope to arrive? When we get there, will the destination deliver the goods? What are the goods?
I have a radical proposition for you. I propose that there are no goods, or at least none worth having. For whatever you manage to acquire, the fact remains that you will arrive at that final station stop without functioning pockets. At that time, whatever you had wanted to stash on your person will instead float away to plant itself for eternity smack in the useless “dash.”
Why not consider jettisoning all the unnecessary bullsh*t beyond the significant challenge that’s directly in front of you: making it through today with a modicum of fulfillment, reliant on a questionable psyche, while living in a deranged culture offering endless opportunities to make things worse?
How Important Are You?
Doing, of course, is also known as living. We are here to experience the full catastrophe, as Zorba the Greek put it — to become besotted on life, to guzzle down as many of its joys and sorrows and agonies and ecstasies that we can get our greedy little hands on and cram into our greedy little calendars.
But look a little deeper at all the doing and what you’ll find is that what most people are really doing is running — from the truth.
What is the truth?
The truth is, we don’t know sh*t. We don’t know what’s going on here. We don’t know what to do. We’re all improvising, doing things simply because we’ve always done them that way, more or less, or because someone told us to.
It may well be that nothing (including the earnest strivings of a well-intentioned depressive) matters any more than the ambitions of that poor housefly-turned-smudge that your quick-handed descendant dispatched. Certainly not to five pounds of dust at the bottom of a box six feet under or a few handfuls of ashes tossed over fields that your kids may not have known or cared that you cherished and thought about constantly.
Eventually, you will be returned to the place from whence you came, releasing back to it the physical matter that you had borrowed, which you organized into the organism that’s making sense of these black marks, or at least I hope so, in a way that, if you think about it, is quite miraculous.
Maybe you will have left behind a few impressive mementos — your name etched on a building or scrawled on several birth certificates. Hey, that’s cool. Nice work, pardner. It’s just, doing those kinds of things is not going to get you where you need to be.
Why not let go of what isn’t serving you and what gives power to your depressive tendency, which is undue focus on what’s not useful, including your addiction to compulsive activity, your desire to escape hard reality, and your insistence on understanding just what’s going on here?
We are so bound up in our minds, so caught up in the sh*t show thought-stream — our “story” — that we actually think we are important. But lol. I submit to you: we need to get over ourselves. When we do, the gloom will start to lift, too.
It is not about you, any more than it’s about your dog, cat, or goldfish. This place is beyond you. It’s beyond all of us. Try as you might, you won’t be able to figure it out. So go easy on yourself. It’s been this way for ten-thousand generations, one after another. During all that time, guaranteed, every single Homo sapien who walked the planet thought they were really important.
If you’re struggling to hold your life and the world up on your shoulders like the Titan god Atlas because you think it’s helping, do yourself a solid. Bend over. Let it slide off. Watch it bounce across the floor and roll out of sight. How? It’s simple. Decide to.
What?
But that’s impossible!
Is it?
Despite what your history (i.e., your depressive demon) is telling you about the difficulty of changing seemingly ingrained beliefs and behaviors, every moment offers the opportunity to do just that.
Try it right now. What the hell. Decide — with all the oomph you can muster. Decide to ignore the demon’s siren song about the power of your past pain and suffering and the need to figure out what’s right and true. Decide to be OK with things just as they are — even if they are the absolute pits. Give yourself permission to release caring about what isn’t.
Like the Samurai warriors of old, place your attention on the rightness of the moment for no other reason than that it is, and on impermanence, mortality, and let’s face it, the cluelessness we all share. Accept it all. Be OK with it. Revel in it, even. That’s the start of an expansion that will absolutely lighten your load.
The bottom line here is to try to let go of additional, unnecessary burden, beyond your personal tendency to be depressed.
More about the guerrilla approach:
